English blog
Trademark on people names?
Seven years ago, a UK born kid was named Loki Skywalker Mowbray. The family was planning to travel to the Dominican Republic and applied for a passport, and the UK Home Office denied the passport because Skywalker is a Trademark of Disney. Same thing happened a few weeks earlier, when a six year old girl named Khaleesi got her passport denied.
Loki got his passport issued, it is said. And I'm baffled that anyone in the Home Office would think that's an acceptable course of action.
The quest for the lost graveyard
About thirty to forty years ago I usually spent my summers in Croatia, on the island of Brač. Some of the time I spent in Donji Humac, the home of my mother’s family, the rest of the time in Pučišća, the home of my father’s family.
In Pučišća, I often spend time with my cousins, including my cousin Robert. Like every kid of that age, we explored the neighborhood, and there was plenty to explore. One day, instead of going our usual way, towards the sea, we went the other direction. We crossed the nearby bypass road, and then, on the other side, found a small graveyard, with a chapel in the middle which also doubled as a crypt for a local rich family.
I remember the pine trees, the shade, the spiderwebs across the trees. I did not remember the name of the family for sure, but I think it was Dominis, or Gospodetnić. I remember the small stone fence which gave the graveyard an almost square shape. I remember the dark plates with the hard to read names, almost washed out by time and the scarce rain.
The main graveyard of Pučišća is in a different place, on the far end of the town, near one of the coves on the way to the large quarry outside of town. Since then, I learned a lot more about the history of Pučišća, and it often mentioned that main graveyard. The history of that place went back to Roman times, featuring a shrine to Jupiter and a little church to Saint Stephen from the 11th century. Also my family’s grave is in that graveyard, but only starting with my grandfather. I could never find where my great grandfather, or earlier generations, were buried.
I came to believe that the other graveyard, the one Robert and I had found, was for the less wealthy people of Pučiśća. I first thought it was the older one, Robert and I called it the 'old graveyard', but this didn’t make sense since the main graveyard literally contains the oldest traces of human settlement in town. We must have been mistaken.
Over the last few years, I tried to figure out more about the graveyard, but none of the sources I read mentioned it. There was also no entry on the find-a-grave website. I used Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps to find it, but failed. I used Google StreetView to follow the bypass road, which has been redone since, but couldn’t find it either. I decided that at the next opportunity I will find the graveyard again, and document all graves on find-a-grave. Maybe I will even find some ancestors.
This year I finally went back to Pučišća for a few weeks. Whereas I found it too hot to do much exploration, on one of the few cooler evenings I decided to finally take the walk, and find it. It took me a while, I wasn’t sure about the way, but eventually I came upon a square enclosure of the right size with a chapel in the middle. The chapel was dedicated to the Lady of Lourdes, and looked somewhat different than I remembered it. In particular, it did not contain a crypt. And although it had pine trees and spider webs, there was not a single grave, merely a large stone cross which had toppled over. On the way back, I also could reconstruct the path that Robert and I took a few decades ago. I am very sure this is the right place, but there are no graves.
I was confused. The next day, I happened to meet Robert. I asked him whether he remembers how we went exploring that direction as kids, and he immediately knew what I was talking about. Seemed to be a core memory for both of us. And then I asked about the graves.
There are no graves, he said. There were never graves. There never was a graveyard, and we had not found one. I had confabulated that whole part. We had found the enclosure and the chapel, but the other memories were an invention of my imagination. No wonder I could never find anything about it.
I am glad I resolved that question. I am a bit surprised by how well established that wrong memory was. Unsurprisingly, I still can recall the wrong memory of the graveyard, even though now I know it is wrong, and any memory of the actual events has long faded and been replaced with my continuous retelling of a story that never happened.
Heading for Germany
We're heading to the airport, to leave the United States, after more than ten years, and settle in Germany. It was a great time. California is amazing and beautiful. We had the opportunity to meet some awesome people, and I hope to stay connected with many of them for the rest of our lives. Thanks to everyone!
Thanks particularly to my wonderful wife who organized this move, and got everything ready for it, including the stressful procurement of an international health certificate for our cat in literally the last day possible. Or getting about hundred boxes packed to be shipped. Or figuring out how to sell a car on a short notice. And many other things, while keeping my back free so I could keep working.
I'm looking forward to come back to Germany, and I hope that my wife and daughter will find welcome and roots in our next part of our journey through life.
For more background on why we are leaving, see the previous post about moving to Germany.
P.S.: International travel with a pet is not recommended.
Github not displaying external contributions anymore
Git is a very widely used version control system. Version control systems are an absolute crucial tool for collaborating and developing software. Git was developed to be a decentralized such system, meaning that people could easier develop their own versions, collaborate on side ideas, and not rely on a single large central repository.
Github is a Microsoft-owned website which made it easy to start, maintain, and share Git repositories. In fact so easy that in many ways the advantages of decentralization that have been built-in into Git have been nullified. Convenience beats many other advantages, or "worse is better", an often stated adage.
Some organizations and projects, such as Wikimedia, decided to host their own Git instance, and not rely on Microsoft's. Due to the decentralized model of Git that's absolutely possible and encouraged. It is a bit of a hassle, but you don't rely on Microsoft for your project.
Github has become an important "hub" for developers, also because they provide profile pages for developers, showing off their contributions, achievements, etc. Hiring managers will often look at a developer's Github page to assess a candidate.
Microsoft made a change that contributions to projects will only "count" and be reflected on the Github profile of the contributor if they are made through Github (unless they are members of the organization owning the mirrored Git). Contributions through other paths don't count for the profile. Microsoft, worth a trillion dollar, is explaining that it's too "nuanced and difficult" for them to continue to display contributions on your profile which happened outside of Github.
I mean, it is clearly the fault of the community to allow Microsoft to embrace and enclosure this space. Will this change be enough to have developers leave Github? (No) How difficult will it be to get hiring managers to not just reflexively look up a Github profile? (Very) Will there be an outcry that will make Microsoft change their mind? (No) Is this just a move to ensure that they enclose the Open Source workflow even more? (They'll say no, and it might even be true, but they sure won't mind that this is happening)
The lesson we should learn, but won't, is to not allow companies to enclose and control such spaces. But we keep doing that, again and again. It's a pity.
Productivity pro tip
- make a list of all things you need to do
- keep that list roughly in order of priority, particularly on the first 3-5 items (lower on the list it doesn't matter that much)
- procrastinate the whole day from doing the number 1 item by doing the number 2 to 5 items
Facebook checking my activity
Facebook locked my account because of unusual behavior. I'm thankful they're checking. I often see obviously spammy behavior on Facebook.
Then they show me my latest posts and comments and ask me which one of these wasn't by me. And they all were by me. There was nothing in the sort of "Oh, I've now seen three of your posts, and you look like a really interesting person. Do you want to be my friend?" or trying to sell NFTs and coins or day trading.
Yeah, no, AI will still take a moment.
Experiment to understand LLMs better
Here’s an experiment I would love to do if I had the resources. Just to start gaining some more understanding of how LLMs work.
- Train an LLM Z on a lot of English text.
- Ensure that the LLM in its response uses correctly the past tense of “go”, “went”, in its responses.
- Ask the LLM directly what the past tense of “to go” is, and expect “went”.
- Remove all sentences / texts from the corpus that contain the word “went”. Add more text to the corpus to make it roughly the same size again.
- Train an LLM A on that corpus.
- Use the same prompts to see what the LLM uses instead of “went”.
- Ask the LLM directly what the past tense of “to go” is. I expect “goed”?
- How many example sentences / texts containing the text “went” does one need to add to the corpus of LLM A and retrain in order for the resulting LLM to get it right. Is one enough? Ten? A thousand?
- Add an explicit sentence ‘The past tense of “to go” is “went”’. to the corpus of LLM A and retrain instead of the implicit training data. Did the trained LLM now get it right? Does it use it right? Does it answer the explicit question correctly?
- Add an explicit sentence to the prompt of LLM A, instead of retraining it. Does it use the word right? Does it answer the explicit question correctly?
If there is some similar work to this out there, or if anyone has some work like this, I’d be very curious for pointers.
P.S.: Also, I would love to see whether people who do research on LLMs could correctly predict the result of this experiment ;)
Taking a self-driving car
Ten years ago, my daughter was just born and I just joined Google, who were working on self-driving cars. And I was always hoping that my daughter would not have to need to learn how to drive a car (but that if she wanted, she may). In the last ten years I lost confidence in that hope.
Yesterday, thanks to my wife organizing it, we took our first ride with a self-driving car, driving about ten minutes through San Francisco. And I guess a world-wide roll out will take time, maybe a lot of time, but what can I say: it drove very well.
Sleeping Lady with a Black Vase
In 2009, a Hungarian art historian was watching the movie Stuart Little with his 3 year old daughter. And he's like "funny, that painting that's used in the set looks like that 1928 black and white photograph I have seen, of a piece of art which has been lost". So he sends a few emails...
Turns out, it *is* the actual artwork by Róbert Berény (1887-1953) which was last seen in public in 1928, and somehow made it to Sony, where it was used in a number of soap opera episodes and in Stuart Little.
The Ring verse in German
I finally got the Lord of the Rings in English. I never read it in its native English, only in a German translation, about thirty years ago.
And already on the first page I am stumped: the ring verse seems to me sooo much better in German than in English. Now, it is absolutely possible that this is due to me having read it as an impressionable teenager and having carried the translation with me for three decades and thus developed fondness and familiarity with it, but I think it's more than that.
Here are the verses in English, German, and a literal back-translation of the German to English:
- Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
- Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
- Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
- One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
- In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
- One Ring to rule them all,
- One Ring to find them,
- One Ring to bring them all,
- and in the darkness bind them
- In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
German translation by von Freymann:
- Drei Ringe den Elbenkönigen hoch im Licht,'
- Sieben den Zwergenherrschern in ihren Hallen aus Stein,
- Den Sterblichen, ewig dem Tode verfallen, neun,
- Einer dem dunklen Herrn auf dunklem Thron
- Im Lande Mordor, wo die Schatten drohn.
- Einen Ring, sie zu knechten, sie all zu finden,
- ins Dunkle zu treiben und ewig zu binden
- Im Lande Mordor, wo die Schatten drohn.
Back-translation of her translation by me:
- Three Rings for the Elven kings high in the light,
- Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
- For the mortals, eternally doomed to death, nine,
- One for the Dark Lord on dark throne
- In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows loom.
- One Ring, to enslave them, to find them,
- to drive to Darkness, and forever bind them
- In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows loom.
The differences are small, but I find the selection of words by the translator to be stronger and more evocative than Tolkien's original. Which is amazing. Thanks to the great Ebba-Margareta von Freymann for her wonderful translation of the poems!
Originally, the publisher Klett hat trouble with translating Tolkien's poems, but Ebba-Margareta had been, for many years working on the translation of poems by Tolkien, and by using her translations, Klett did a great service to the book for the German-speaking world.
